"Britney said she was tired of people touching her head," said Emily Wynne-Hughes, 19, who had been hanging out with friends at the Body & Soul parlor in Sherman Oaks, Calif., Friday night.

"She said she had just had her head shaved. She still had hair on her sweatshirt," Wynne-Hughes told the Daily News yesterday. "She seemed distraught and disturbed. The whole time, I felt like she wasn't there, like her body was but her thoughts were somewhere else.

"It was crazy, very surreal. . . . She's definitely crying out."

"She asked if she could shave her own hair, and she did," said J.T. .Tognozzi, whose wife owns Esther's Haircutting Studio in the Tarzana district of Los Angeles.

"Then she looked in the mirror and said, 'Oh my God, my mother is not going to like this.' "